The real interesting thing here is this: Fox specially encoded episodes at 1080i for this broadcast on Universal HD -- which, of course, is owned by Universal Pictures. Is it possible Fox could be licensing the series to Universal for an HD box-set release in the future?

I know. My hope is that if Universal magically licenses the rights, we could see Firefly and Serenity together on the same HD format. Because as of now, Universal only supports HD DVD and Fox is Blu-ray exclusive.

Yeah, it's upscaled. And somebody has come up with a process to have Bluray and HD-DVD on the same disc (double sided), however it's been patented by a firm and the existing players don't support it. Give it a few years and either one of the formats will have died, or multiformat players will be the norm.

Hmm, not the sharpest HD presentation i've seen. Fairly low bitrate, and compression artifacts evident on the smokey and dusty scenes ( of which there were a lot ). Noticably softer during any effects shot due to upscaling I guess. The opening battle scene didn't seem HD at all though. Some scenes looked great though, especially well lit ones. It may have been a DD5.1 soundtrack but really it was nothing more than an upmixed dolby surround, as there was almost no activity in the surrounds. The centre channel was well used though, although it highlighted some of the shortcomings in the original dialogue recordings as it frequently went from clear as a bell ADR to muffly on set recorded dialogue in the same scene. Kind of like the Star Wars ep IV dvd.